When many people think about Native Americans or American Indians, a few standard images come to mind.  They typically envision people from the Great Plains, riding bareback on horses with feathered headdresses, or they conjure up images of Apache men holding a rifle.  Sometimes they think about cartoonish portrayals of “Pocahontas” or the “Indians” associated with modern Thanksgiving.  Inevitably the popular imagination includes an association with nature and “spirituality,” or alternately, some degree of savagery and violence. 

On 31 October, 2018, El Paso Community College (EPCC) students participated in an event aimed at encouraging them to learn about and feel inspired by their community’s history.  The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP sponsored the event, which took place at the EPCC Northwest Campus where students presented their projects centered on historic sites in El Paso, Texas that are rumored to be haunted.

Some may not see connections between the rolling hills of England's Lake District and the rugged desert southwest of the Texas-Mexico borderland, but the one thing that is for certain is that the humanities can make connections anywhere in the world.

It has always been my lifelong goal to work in a museum, and that goal became a reality when I was given the opportunity to work at the UTEP Centennial Museum as an Undergraduate Intern through The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP.

We often think of history as large, impersonal events and not something in which we participate daily and in the most unlikely ways, as we often do with food. Food shapes cultures and histories, politics and economics, personal relations and geographies.